More Topaz reverse-engineering progress (job stuff)
by at 11:57 PM
This is cool, a bunch of people at Mobileread have done a pretty thorough job of reverse-engineering the Topaz format, and even have rudimentary tools to convert Topaz into SVG, PDF, and XHTML. I'm a bit dismayed that they don't seem to realize how much work went into "just took the book and scanned it, ran an ocr and some corrections/images and put together a huge slow package and called it a salable ebook," but oh well.
Comments
I think the initial criticisms of Topaz came from the Kindle being slower to open and read those books vs the much simpler Mobipocket format. However, current kindle firmware seems to render Topaz books as quickly as Mobi books and the only ones left complaining are the multi-reader geeks that own 23 different eReading gadgets and expect to be able to read all the books from all their content providers on all of their devices.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with their expectations, but pointing out that the average Kindle user doesn't care one way or another about the book format. And that seems to imply that Topaz has been a success -- getting books digitized and onto the Kindles of eager readers.
Thanks for these incredibly interesting blog entries on Topaz.